by Marta Perry
She shook her head. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. You should remember that croup can go on for a while. You may as well go on to bed. I’m not afraid to walk back to the house by myself.”
To her relief, Isaiah didn’t argue. There was no point in any more people losing sleep because of Sadie’s croup, and the cows had to be milked in the morning regardless of whether the humans had gotten any sleep or not.
“I’ll see you in the morning, then.” He squeezed Naomi’s shoulder and went out, closing the door quietly.
Nathan glanced at the clock. Maybe Isaiah’s visit made him aware of how late it was getting. “You should probably go on home. Sadie seems better now.”
Naomi could hear the reluctance in his voice, and she shook her head. She couldn’t leave Nathan alone to deal with a sick child. “She’s still making that little noise in her throat. I’m afraid we’re not over this episode yet. I’ll stay.”
He gave her a look of relief. “Denke, Naomi. Truth be told, I’d not like to be managing this by myself.”
“Croup sounds much scarier than it is.” She wanted to allay the concern that lurked in his eyes, but she knew Nathan could never stop worrying about his children.
“Scary? That doesn’t begin to describe it. I thought…” He stopped, running his hands over his face.
Her heart lurched. Nathan seemed bound to compare every bump in his children’s path to Ada’s death. She felt his pain. She also felt helpless to do anything about it.
It was nearly two in the morning when Naomi finally tucked Sadie into her own bed with a feeling of assurance that the worst was over. They’d had to resort to the steam tent twice more, but each time the episode had lasted a shorter time. She went back down the stairs, weariness dragging at her. She’d forgotten how tiring and stressful it could be, staying up with a sick child.
Nathan was in the kitchen. He turned from the sink when he heard her, and she realized he was clearing away the kettle and the cups they’d used what seemed an eternity ago.
“You don’t need to clean up. I’ll do that in the morning.”
Nathan’s face was tight, and her heart seemed to skip a beat.
“Nathan?” She went to him, reaching out as she would to a hurting child. “Was ist letz? Sadie will be fine.”
“I know.” His voice rasped as if it pained him to speak. “I just…” He swallowed, and she could see the muscles work in his throat. “I should not be afraid. I should trust in God’s will. But—” His voice seemed to fail him.
“But Sadie’s illness made you relive Ada’s death.” She finished the thought for him, knowing too well that was his nightmare.
He clutched the sink, the muscles standing out on his forearms like cords, staring blindly at the darkness beyond the window.
“I chust went into town after supper to pick up an order of feed. The storm started when I was ready to leave for home, so I waited at the mill.” A shudder went through him.
Naomi wanted to tell him to stop, not to relive that night again. But she couldn’t. Nathan was already caught in the nightmare of remembering.
“It was such a quick storm. A few lightning strikes and a couple rumbles of thunder. That was all.” He sounded almost bewildered.
“I know,” she said softly. “I remember.” She had been at home, rushing into the house with some sheets she’d pulled off the line when the storm came up. She’d been thinking of nothing beyond saving her laundry from getting soaked.
“I started toward home the minute the rain slacked off. The ambulance passed me on the road, the siren wailing. I think I knew then.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” She touched his arm, but he seemed so far away he might not have felt it. “Isaiah and your daad were in the south field, but by the time they saw that the barn had been hit and reached it, it was too late.”
He shook his head, lowering it like an animal in pain. His shoulders hunched. “If I had been here—”
“You would have been out with your daad and Isaiah in the field, fixing the fence.” She moved her hand on his shoulder, gripping it, longing to comfort him and not knowing how. “Could you have done more? Run faster than Isaiah? Been more clever than your daad? You know that you could not.”
Poor Isaiah. Her little brother had been the one to rush into the burning barn, to find Ada lying under the beam that had fallen when she’d tried to lead the workhorses to safety. The horses had gotten out with minor injuries, but Ada was gone all in an instant.
“I know.” Nathan turned on Naomi with a sudden spurt of anger. “I know they did all that could be done. That doesn’t stop me from feeling how wrong it is. It should have been me in that barn, not Ada.”
His anger was like a flame, scorching her, but she couldn’t falter now that Nathan was finally speaking.
“That is what Isaiah said,” she replied softly. “When I got here I found him out behind the toolshed, weeping. ‘It should have been me,’ he kept repeating. But it wasn’t. Ada was the closest, so Ada was the one who went into the barn.”
“It’s not right.”
The words came out in one last burst of anger, and then tears spilled over. Nathan turned to her as naturally as one of the children would, and she put her arms around him, murmuring the soothing nonsense words she’d have used to any hurting creature.
It had been too long in coming, this outpouring of his grief. Nathan had held it back, trying to be strong, and now the dam was broken. She could only hold him and pray that this release would bring healing in its wake.
After what seemed a long time but was probably only moments Nathan straightened, rubbing his face with one hand. “I’m sorry. I should not have given way.”
“Ja, you should.” Her hands were still on his upper arms, and she wanted to shake him. “Holding grief inside hurts you, Nathan. And it hurts those around you. Do you imagine Ada would want that for you?”
“Always so wise, Naomi. So strong.” It might have been said mockingly, but it wasn’t. “That was what Ada always said about you, and she was right.”
He almost smiled, his face relaxing. And then his gaze caught hers. His expression became arrested, as if he saw something he had not seen before. He raised his hand, his fingertips brushing her cheek.
Everything changed. He wasn’t a child she was comforting. He was a man, and the look in his eyes made her heart stop.
“Naomi.” He said her name softly, his fingers against her cheek. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
And then he was stepping back, turning away. “I…I’m sorry. It’s late. You should be at home, ja?”
“Ja.” She knew what he was feeling, because she felt it, too. He was searching for balance in a world that had suddenly shifted.
And he was right. They could not do or say anything here in the night that they might want back in the light of day.
But as she put her coat and mittens on and picked up the torch that would light her way home, she couldn’t repress the tiny sprig of hope that seemed to be blossoming in her heart.
The torch sent a yellow circle of light ahead of her as she walked across the frozen field. She nearly didn’t need it, so bright was the moonlight.
She tilted her head back, looking up at a sky that seemed overfull of stars, clustering across the darkness in points of light. The night was so still that she could hear the faintest creaking of the snow cover beneath her feet and a tiny rustle that might belong to some small creature burrowing into its hole. It would never occur to her to be frightened here, even though not a soul seemed awake.
Those moments in the kitchen when Nathan had touched her face—had they meant as much to him as they did to her? Or had that been just a natural reaction to the emotions stirred up by Sadie’s illness and the release of finally talking about Ada’s death?
She couldn’t be sure, and she must not assume anything. When she saw Nathan again, she must act as if all was just as it had been between them. She—
Naomi stopped
, as frozen as the earth. There had been an alien sound interrupting her thoughts. The sound was something that shouldn’t be there in the quiet middle of the night, but what?
She listened, her finger on the switch of the torch, but the noise, whatever it had been, wasn’t repeated. Well, sounds carried in the night. Maybe it was something fairly far away, some natural sound that she wouldn’t even notice in the daytime.
It was gone now and nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, she walked a bit more quickly the rest of the way to the warmth and safety of her house.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Let’s go into this shop.” Joshua had his face pressed against the window of the gift shop in town. “It has lots of pretty things. We can find something for Naomi for sure in here.”
“We’ll give it a try.” Nathan had actually been heading for the quilt shop, thinking that Katie Brand might be able to guide the young ones in finding a gift for Naomi, but this might do as well. He pulled open the door of the gift shop, setting its bell jingling.
They had dropped Naomi at the grocery store, and he’d said they’d be back in an hour. Naomi probably guessed their errand, but she hadn’t let on, delighting the children.
Naomi had been just as usual in the two days since the night he’d broken down talking to her about the way Ada had died. Or more to the point, since the moment he’d looked into her face and felt such longing that he had become a stranger to himself.
“Look around and see if you find anything you might like to give Naomi,” he told the children, “but be careful about touching things, ja?”
They both nodded solemnly, and Joshua took Sadie’s hand. He led her off through the aisles, leaving Nathan struggling with his thoughts. He pretended interest in the closest display, which happened to be of candles.
Naomi had been her usual serene self since that night. He was the one turned upside down, and he didn’t know how to right himself. He just knew he couldn’t possibly have the kind of feelings for Naomi that he’d had for Ada. He couldn’t.
What had happened between them had surely been an accident. He had been upset about Sadie, and then doubly upset because he’d blurted out all his grief over Ada’s death in a way he couldn’t believe in the light of day.
What had possessed him to talk like that to Naomi? She grieved for Ada, too, and he had burdened her with his pain. And then he’d made things worse by imagining he felt something, by touching her face…For an instant he was back in that moment, with Naomi’s soft skin warm under his fingers.
“Daadi? Komm, see what I found.” Sadie’s voice was a welcome interruption.
He tried to shove thoughts of Naomi to the back of his mind, no easy task when they were busy trying to find gifts for her. He went around a display full of baskets to find Sadie staring at a glass ball enclosing a nativity scene.
“Do you like the snow globe?” Mrs. Macklin, owner of the shop, smiled at Sadie and took the snow globe from the shelf. She shook it and set it down right in front of Sadie, so that the child could see the snow falling on the nativity scene.
Sadie clasped her hands together. “Ach, Daadi, isn’t it beautiful? And Naomi said we should have a putz to remind us of Jesus being born.”
The putz was the nativity set found in most Pennsylvania Dutch homes at this time of year. They had one, of course. With a jolt to his heart, Nathan realized he hadn’t gotten it out since Ada’s death. The putz had been hers from the time she was a little girl, and he hadn’t wanted to be reminded.
“Ja, it is very nice,” he said. “But it seems to me it’s something you’d like, not something for Naomi. Let’s keep looking.”
Sadie pouted for a minute, but then she hurried off in search of her brother. Nathan handed the globe to Mrs. Macklin. “Will you put it in our package so the kinder don’t see?”
She smiled, tucking it into her sweater pocket. “Don’t worry. We’re very good at keeping Christmas secrets.”
Nodding, he started after the children and then stopped, his attention caught by a display of preserves in jars similar to the ones Naomi used for her honey. Each jar had a label indicating the type of fruit inside a curving border that looked like a vine.
Mrs. Macklin, perhaps sensing another sale, moved closer. “Do you like those?”
“Not the preserves,” he said. “But do you know where I could get labels similar to those?”
“I can do that for you,” she assured him quickly. “I would just need to know what you want on the labels and what sort of design you’d like.”
“You can actually design the labels?” He seemed to be back at the kitchen table with Naomi, talking about what she should do for her labels. He’d nearly forgotten that conversation, with everything that had happened afterward.
“I’m not an artist, but I have a computer program for creating labels, and it has all sorts of designs. I’m sure we could find one that would work.” Lisa Macklin gestured toward the counter. “Do you want to come over to the computer, and I’ll show you what I have? Don’t worry about the children. I’m sure they won’t get into anything they shouldn’t.” She smiled. “Not like some of the tourists we have in here during the summer.”
Naomi would like the labels for sure, and he’d seen enough of her sketchy designs to be able to pick something out. He could almost imagine the pleasure on her face when she saw them. And maybe the gift would be a way of saying he supported her business, too.
“Ja, that would be gut.” He followed Mrs. Macklin to the computer.
A few clicks and the computer displayed a bewildering array of labels. Each one had a border with words in the center.
“If you tell me what it’s for, I can narrow down the selections a little.”
He nodded, knowing that made sense. “It is for Naomi Esch’s honey.” He had an urge to explain why he was buying something for her, but why would Mrs. Macklin care? “Do you know it?”
“Yes, definitely. I bought a jar when I was in the bakery just a few days ago. And I think I have the perfect design.” She clicked the keys again, frowning at the machine as if that would force it along.
“There,” she said. “What do you think?”
The design that had come up on the screen had a curving border of vines and tiny blossoms. At the very top was a honey bee, seeming to hover in flight.
“It’s just right.” Nathan could picture the light in Naomi’s eyes when she saw the image.
“Great. I can put any wording on the labels you’d like. It would just take a day to give me time to finish and print the labels, and then you can pick them up.” She handed him a pad. “Just put the wording you want and how many. I’ll have them ready for you to pick up by tomorrow.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be in town tomorrow.” He would not want her to think he’d ordered something and then not come for it.
“No problem.” She smiled. “I trust you. They’ll be ready at the counter with your name on the package whenever you stop by.”
“Denke.” Nathan hesitated, pen poised over the paper. The Amish didn’t go in for fancy labels, of course, but he thought he’d convinced Naomi that she should use her name.
Naomi’s Honey, he printed carefully. Four dozen seemed a good number to start with, and he could always get more if need be. He could have put Clover Honey, but Naomi had talked about the different honeys she’d get, depending upon what nectar the bees had access to.
He was smiling as he went in search of the children again, imagining Naomi’s happiness when she opened the gift. Maybe it wasn’t something fancy, but he knew she would understand the thought.
He found Joshua and Sadie admiring a napkin holder painted with a distelfinks design.
“Do you think Naomi would like this napkin holder, Daadi?” Joshua’s small face was very serious, as if choosing the right gift was the most important thing in his life right now.
“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “Maybe we should look some more.”
He suspected Sadie woul
d be happy to look around the shop all day. “I think it is a wonderful-gut gift. It is both useful and pretty.”
“Like Naomi,” Joshua said, the serious look dissolving into a smile. “She is useful and pretty too, ja?”
Before Nathan could respond, someone else spoke. “Doing your Christmas shopping?” Seth Miller stood there, seeming perfectly comfortable to be shopping in Pleasant Valley instead of whatever big city stores he usually frequented.
“We found a present for Naomi, Onkel Seth.” Joshua seemed to have gotten over whatever reservation he felt about this new uncle. “Do you think she will like it?”
Seth looked over the napkin holder gravely, as if the choice were as important to him as it was to Joshua. “I’m sure she will.”
Joshua nodded, satisfied. “Komm, Sadie. We’ll take it to the counter.” They ran off, with Joshua clutching the napkin holder, leaving Nathan alone with Seth.
“I didn’t know you were still in town.” Nathan hoped that didn’t sound unfriendly, but he couldn’t deny that Seth’s presence made him uncomfortable.
Seth shrugged. “I’ve made arrangements to stay until Christmas. It seems important to Mamm, so I figured it was the least I could do.”
“Ja.” As far as Nathan was concerned, it really was the least Seth had ever done.
“You don’t like me much, do you?” Seth’s voice had hardened, but it didn’t sound as if Nathan’s feelings bothered him.
Nathan blew out a breath, trying to organize his chaotic thoughts. “My liking doesn’t matter, does it?” he said finally, torn between the truth and kindness. “Your mamm is glad you are here, and that’s all that counts.”
Seth nodded, as if he hadn’t expected anything more. “Will you let the children accept Christmas presents from me?”
The simple question presented a difficult choice. Nathan could not easily forget the pain Seth had caused his parents and sisters when he went away. He didn’t want his children added to the list of people Seth had hurt.
Then he heard Naomi’s soft voice in his head. What would Ada want? Nathan couldn’t doubt the answer to that question.
